House and Home

Sections

Home Rational Home

Whereas Emily Post presented social propriety as a cultural legacy
everyone could and should inherit, The Modern
Priscilla magazine treated housekeeping as a profession, calling
itself the "trade paper of the home." Published from 1887 to
1930
and addressing everything from needlework and fashion to cooking and
decorating, its editors also published books on housekeeping techniques
perfected in their state-of-the-art "proving plant." One of
these books, The Modern Priscilla Home Furnishing
Book, published in 1925, stressed rational planning in the home and
counseled women to follow a plan based on the principle of "fitness
to purpose." This plan had to consider both the sizes and shapes of
rooms and the needs of their occupants, and it was made feasible by the
how-to advice the book offered for inexpensively improving the home.

Such an approach reflects several housing trends that had been in
motion since the 1870s. In response to the reform movement that had made
high-quality, low-cost housing widely available for working people,
architects and designers in the arts and crafts movement had generated a
large body of "life-simplifying" magazines, booklets, and
workshops. Their publications featured plans for building bungalows-the
small house design favored after 1900-and their workshops taught men how
to build practical furniture to replace the ornate, overstuffed,
"overly-feminine" décor of Victorian times. The bungalow was
instead to be more hospitable to men by virtue of its more rational design
and less delicate and more comfortable furniture.

One of the Priscilla book's authors,
Charles Alma Byers, was a leading proponent of the arts and
crafts-bungalow movement. The book's inclusion of stencils for wall
designs, its directions for reupholstering and re-caning furniture, and
even its advice on how to decorate to keep a husband from going out at
night, bear his imprint. The scientific tone the Priscilla editors took
also reflected the home economics movement, the effort to establish
principles of efficiency, "judicious consumption," and
handicraft production in the home that would put women's work on par with
men's professions.

Modern Priscilla Home Furnishing Book" id="view" />"The correct procedure" from Modern Priscilla Home Furnishing Book

Magazines, like The Modern Priscilla, encouraged women to think of homemaking as a profession vital to humanity's continued progress. As home economists, their goal was to replace ornate Victorian decoration with simple and comfortable modern be...